Many open source projects attain a level of “maturity” where no one really needs any new features and there aren’t a lot of new bugs being found, and the contributors to these projects dwindle, often to a single maintainer who is generally grateful for developers who take an interest in these older projects and offer to share the choresome, intermittent work of keeping the projects alive.

Ironically, these are often projects with millions of users, who trust them specifically because of their stolid, unexciting maturity.

This presents a scary social-engineering vector for malware: A malicious person volunteers to help maintain the project, makes some small, positive contributions, gets commit access to the project, and releases a malicious patch, infecting millions of users and apps.

This is an interesting security vulnerability: because it is so easy to impersonate iOS password prompts, a malicious app can steal your password just by asking.

Why does this work?

iOS asks the user for their iTunes password for many reasons, the most common ones are recently installed iOS operating system updates, or iOS apps that are stuck during installation.

As a result, users are trained to just enter their Apple ID password whenever iOS prompts you to do so. However, those popups are not only shown on the lock screen, and the home screen, but also inside random apps, e.g. when they want to access iCloud, GameCenter or In-App-Purchases.

This could easily be abused by any app, just by showing an UIAlertController, that looks exactly like the system dialog.

Even users who know a lot about technology have a hard time detecting that those alerts are phishing attacks.

The essay proposes some solutions, but I’m not sure they’ll work. We’re all trained to trust our computers and the applications running on them.

LyreBird is a system that can accurately reproduce the voice of someone, given a large amount of sample inputs. It’s pretty good — listen to the demo here — and will only get better over time.

The applications for recorded-voice forgeries are obvious, but I think the larger security risk will be real-time forgery. Imagine the social engineering implications of an attacker on the telephone being able to impersonate someone the victim knows.

I don’t think we’re ready for this. We use people’s voices to authenticate them all the time, in all sorts of different ways.

It’s not hard to imagine the criminal possibilities of automation, autonomy, and artificial intelligence. But the imaginings are becoming mainstream — and the future isn’t too far off.

Along similar lines, computers are able to predict court verdicts. My guess is that the real use here isn’t to predict actual court verdicts, but for well-paid defense teams to test various defensive tactics.

Yet another leaked catalog of Internet attack services, this one specializing in disinformation:

But Aglaya had much more to offer, according to its brochure. For eight to 12 weeks campaigns costing €2,500 per day, the company promised to “pollute” internet search results and social networks like Facebook and Twitter “to manipulate current events.” For this service, which it labelled “Weaponized Information,” Aglaya offered “infiltration,” “ruse,” and “sting” operations to “discredit a target” such as an “individual or company.”

“[We] will continue to barrage information till it gains ‘traction’ & top 10 search results yield a desired results on ANY Search engine,” the company boasted as an extra “benefit” of this service.

Aglaya also offered censorship-as-a-service, or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, for only €600 a day, using botnets to “send dummy traffic” to targets, taking them offline, according to the brochure. As part of this service, customers could buy an add-on to “create false criminal charges against Targets in their respective countries” for a more costly €1 million.

[…]

Some of Aglaya’s offerings, according to experts who reviewed the document for Motherboard, are likely to be exaggerated or completely made-up. But the document shows that there are governments interested in these services, which means there will be companies willing to fill the gaps in the market and offer them.

This report describes a malware attack with circumstantial links to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In the interest of highlighting a developing threat, this post analyzes the attack and provides a list of Indicators of Compromise.

A Syrian citizen media group critical of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) was recently targeted in a customized digital attack designed to unmask their location. The Syrian group, Raqqah is being Slaughtered Silently (RSS), focuses its advocacy on documenting human rights abuses by ISIS elements occupying the city of Ar-Raqah. In response, ISIS forces in the city have reportedly targeted the group with house raids, kidnappings, and an alleged assassination. The group also faces online threats from ISIS and its supporters, including taunts that ISIS is spying on the group.

Though we are unable to conclusively attribute the attack to ISIS or its supporters, a link to ISIS is plausible. The malware used in the attack differs substantially from campaigns linked to the Syrian regime, and the attack is focused against a group that is an active target of ISIS forces.

“The next time you call for assistance because the Internet service in your home is not working, the ‘technician’ who comes to your door may actually be an undercover government agent. He will have secretly disconnected the service, knowing that you will naturally call for help and — ­when he shows up at your door, impersonating a technician­ — let him in. He will walk through each room of your house, claiming to diagnose the problem. Actually, he will be videotaping everything (and everyone) inside. He will have no reason to suspect you have broken the law, much less probable cause to obtain a search warrant. But that makes no difference, because by letting him in, you will have ‘consented’ to an intrusive search of your home.”

This chilling scenario is the first paragraph of a motion to suppress evidence gathered by the police in exactly this manner, from a hotel room. Unbelievably, this isn’t a story from some totalitarian government on the other side of an ocean. This happened in the United States, and by the FBI. Eventually — I’m sure there will be appeals — higher U.S. courts will decide whether this sort of practice is legal. If it is, the country will slide even further into a society where the police have even more unchecked power than they already possess.

The facts are these. In June, Two wealthy Macau residents stayed at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. The hotel suspected that they were running an illegal gambling operation out of their room. They enlisted the police and the FBI, but could not provide enough evidence for them to get a warrant. So instead they repeatedly cut the guests’ Internet connection. When the guests complained to the hotel, FBI agents wearing hidden cameras and recorders pretended to be Internet repair technicians and convinced the guests to let them in. They filmed and recorded everything under the pretense of fixing the Internet, and then used the information collected from that to get an actual search warrant. To make matters even worse, they lied to the judge about how they got their evidence.

The FBI claims that their actions are no different from any conventional sting operation. For example, an undercover policeman can legitimately look around and report on what he sees when he invited into a suspect’s home under the pretext of trying to buy drugs. But there are two very important differences: one of consent, and the other of trust. The former is easier to see in this specific instance, but the latter is much more important for society.

You can’t give consent to something you don’t know and understand. The FBI agents did not enter the hotel room under the pretext of making an illegal bet. They entered under a false pretext, and relied on that for consent of their true mission. That makes things different. The occupants of the hotel room didn’t realize who they were giving access to, and they didn’t know their intentions. The FBI knew this would be a problem. According to the New York Times, “a federal prosecutor had initially warned the agents not to use trickery because of the ‘consent issue.’ In fact, a previous ruse by agents had failed when a person in one of the rooms refused to let them in.” Claiming that a person granting an Internet technician access is consenting to a police search makes no sense, and is no different than one of those “click through” Internet license agreements that you didn’t read saying one thing and while meaning another. It’s not consent in any meaningful sense of the term.

Far more important is the matter of trust. Trust is central to how a society functions. No one, not even the most hardened survivalists who live in backwoods log cabins, can do everything by themselves. Humans need help from each other, and most of us need a lot of help from each other. And that requires trust. Many Americans’ homes, for example, are filled with systems that require outside technical expertise when they break: phone, cable, Internet, power, heat, water. Citizens need to trust each other enough to give them access to their hotel rooms, their homes, their cars, their person. Americans simply can’t live any other way.

It cannot be that every time someone allows one of those technicians into our homes they are consenting to a police search. Again from the motion to suppress: “Our lives cannot be private — ­and our personal relationships intimate­ — if each physical connection that links our homes to the outside world doubles as a ready-made excuse for the government to conduct a secret, suspicionless, warrantless search.” The resultant breakdown in trust would be catastrophic. People would not be able to get the assistance they need. Legitimate servicemen would find it much harder to do their job. Everyone would suffer.

It all comes back to the warrant. Through warrants, Americans legitimately grant the police an incredible level of access into our personal lives. This is a reasonable choice because the police need this access in order to solve crimes. But to protect ordinary citizens, the law requires the police to go before a neutral third party and convince them that they have a legitimate reason to demand that access. That neutral third party, a judge, then issues the warrant when he or she is convinced. This check on the police’s power is for Americans’ security, and is an important part of the Constitution.